Lead Story

Of the three school districts in the Eugene-Springfield area, Bethel School District, with 5,700 students in northwest Eugene, is considered more diminutive than the rest. That’s not entirely accurate, Bethel Superintendent Colt Gill says, when you take a look at the bigger picture. “There are just under 200 school districts in Oregon, and out of those 200, Bethel is the 24th largest school district,” he says.

As a younger child, I attended three elementary schools: Edison Elementary School, Parker Elementary School and Camas Ridge Community School. I always had to get used to making new friends, getting a new routine and getting used to a new school.

Back in elementary school, I never thought I would be this close to high school. All I was thinking about was when recess was going to be and if I should yell at boys to stop being so annoying. Now I have to think about the next four years of my life until I graduate and possibly go to college.

Graduate high school. Think about your future career. Get a profession. That is Leticia Gonzalez’s advice for her daughters. She is sitting with them at the kitchen table in their Springfield home, and they banter with each other about school, work and family.

“Sometimes I think they get tired of listening to me say ‘Go to college,’” Gonzalez says, who requested to speak with EW via an interpreter because she feels more comfortable with Spanish. “It’s the reality: work and study.”

With all the dazzling marriage proposals on YouTube, it’s getting more and more difficult to be original — how can you compete with flash mobs, scavenger hunts and musical ensembles? Forty-year-old McMinnville resident Daniel Evans found a way — and he used a copy of Eugene Weekly to do it.

This Valentine’s season, say goodbye to chocolates and flowersand consider treating yourself — with or without a partner — to a safe, sex-savvy workshop.

Kim Marks, owner of the new gender-inclusive eco-conscious sex shop As You Like It, wants you to have a good sex life. And in addition to providing the toys and treats to do so, the shop will present workshops with professional sex educators covering everything from sex toys to the G-spot.

For a Wednesday night, it’s a good scene — a burly, handsome scene. I may be recently hitched, but I still get a little hot and bothered at the sight of some 30 men fraternizing in the dim light of Jameson’s, carousing at the long wood bar and slapping each other heartily on the back.

Dating is hard for me. But I actually feel like my bar isn’t set that high: Writer/professor type ISO decent-looking man who doesn’t mind that my pitbull sleeps on the bed and that I come home most nights smelling like a horse. Must be able to construct complete sentences and spell.

I feel like this last part is where I go awry, and my criteria even seems to offend people. Not the pitbull part — the spelling test. Potential suitors see that caveat and take it as a writer’s form of cock block. Writer’s cock block.

“Best-kept secret” doesn’t begin to describe Eugene’s Telephone Pioneer Museum. Though visibly situated next to the CenturyLink building downtown on East 10th Avenue, the place is only identifiable from the street by an oblong window displaying rotary telephones and a small, red-lettered sign on the door reading: “MUSEUM.”

Sit beside the river and sip a glass of wine after a long day at work. Lay yourself down by the river and relax after a long run. Go fishing, go rafting, go wading, go birdwatching.

As winter slowly starts to wind down, our river dreams start to flow. The Willamette River winds through Eugene and Springfield, and the McKenzie flows on the outskirts of town, but how often do we really see it from our urban streets?

It has always struck me as one of the great injustices of womanhood — the monthly bloodbath from a body part that is normally reserved for sexytime (not a baby corridor just yet, thank you very much). I try to tell myself that it’s some great honor, an ancient rite of femininity that brings me closer to nature and the goddess within us all.

But that kind of bullshit isn’t terribly reassuring when you’ve bled through your pants and flushed your last tampon down the toilet.

We’ve all rubbed a salve into a sore muscle or joint and breathed a sweet sigh of relief. There are the old standbys, Icy Hot or BenGay. Tiger balm has saved my lower back with its cool, soothing cloud of numbness.

Now there’s a new player in the topical pain relief game — topical cannabis.

“Gaining weight was the worst possible thing that could happen,” says 17-year-old South Eugene High School senior Sophie Kreitzberg. Returning from a 500-mile walk along Spain’s Camino de Santiago, Kreitzberg had never been so thin. “I got so much attention,” she remembers, noting that she experienced her first romance, was cast in plays and that social interaction was just easier as a thin woman.

“My grandmother cried because I was so beautiful,” Kreitzberg recalls.

Nia is a form of exercise that mixes yoga, martial arts and dance techniques, but never mind what it is exactly: That analyzing part of your brain has no place here. Nia is about the joy of having arms and legs and knees and shoulders. It’s exploring the movements that your body loves.

Your smartphone lets you listen to music, read the newspaper, filter your photos and find people to date. It can also help you lose weight and stay fit. If your New Year’s resolution is to have less screen time and more gym time, you might want to think again — turn your phone time to fitness time with these free apps.

I’m a sucker for A Charlie Brown Christmas, and as a kid I managed to tune out the whole birth of Christ thing at the end and just focus on that sad little tree becoming beautiful once everyone comes together to decorate and nurture it (and nurture Charlie Brown himself).

It always begins this way — with a moment of mystical clarity and ease, eyes closing of their own accord. The head starts to sway side to side with the steady pizzicato of the upright bass. A sound so open and full, you could stand in it.

Then comes the circular sound of brushes on a snare drum — fluid, guitar and piano key flavors, and finally, floating on top, a voice: Oh, I hate to see the evening sun go down, ’cause my lovin’ baby done left this town…

The title of her new book is Falling from Horses, Oregon author Molly Gloss clarifies, not Falling off Horses. The preposition might seem to be a fine distinction, but Gloss says the title is meant as a metaphor — when you say falling off a horse, it is just about falling off a horse, she says.

Many of the best graphic novels published this year detail stories of expanding frontiers. Some of these transgressed borders are physical, while others are spiritual or emotional. All of these books, however, celebrate the spirit of exploration that comics so vividly bring to life.

To steal a name from that vast bookstore in Portland, Eugene is a city of books — and of readers. Our small local bookstores and excellent city library, not to mention free and inexpensive book sources such as Gertie the Bookbus and St. Vincent dePaul, ensure that Lane County’s literary lovers can have a book with their coffee or kombucha to curl up with this winter.